I have a love/hate relationship with the Bean Machine.

On one hand, Puyo Puyo is just a pretty fun game and the Sonic skin is a nice touch with a simple but admittedly fun piece of music.

On the other hand, this is the hardest game I have ever beaten and one of my proudest moments playing a game ever. Finishing this game was my Mt Everest and I thought I was slowly going insane for hours on end.

Cleared on July 9th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 22/160)

This Puyo-Puyo clone may seem pretty quirky featuring characters from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog TV show with simple gameplay where you take these "beans" as they call it and match four of the same color at minimum to make them disappear, chaining together combos to clear the board much easier and get a higher score. While a quick round of single player Puyo-Puyo in Exercise Mode may seem pretty relaxed, it's Scenario Mode that brings out the chaos and stress of the game because it is very hard.

It plays like normal Puyo-Puyo, but the catch is that you are dueling against Robotnik's minions and they get much harder and harder while devising their own strategies. They are able to keep up with fast speeds at a perfect pace and in order to beat them, you need to sabotage them with combos, but they too can sabotage you and make it even more difficult for you. And for the record, I was only playing Normal difficulty.

If "Normal" difficulty feels like playing against a Super Computer, then "Hard" must be playing against God and "Hardest" is playing against someone who uses Rewind and Save States against you. All while being given a smug and douchey look from some of these characters like they just knew they won and you're hopeless to do anything about it, further adding to the frustration you may face.

But it is beatable although it may take a great deal of luck to find opportunities to pull off the best combos, and it's not like Pokemon Puzzle League where the difficulty can feel so rubber banded that the enemy will somehow lose to itself just because the game suspects you are not very good at the game. Even still, it does take a good deal of practice, knowledge of Puyo-Puyo, and excellent reaction and focus in order to stand off against your foes.

Supposedly from what I hear, the difficulty of the game is just way off compared to other Puyo-Puyo titles although I have yet to confirm this as it is deemed too brutal and yeah, I can definitely get it. I've experienced this first hand and even after completing the game, the game dared me to do "Hard mode" and I was just like "lol, nope".

But despite this, it's still just Puyo-Puyo. It functions as it should. You move the pieces, you rotate them, and you place and match ones of the same color. It's simple and it's fun. If you're wanting to experience the game somehow, it's not a bad option. There's a pretty good chance you own this game if you have any Sega Genesis Collection.

frustratingly both really fun and too difficult and luck dependent for me to really get into. the game does a REALLY good job at making you want to beat it, though, by making the enemy robots look like the stupidest fucking assholes. make no mistake: they fucked your girlfriend AND your mother and have FULL intentions of continuing to do so. you just NEED to destroy them so bad and every time you lose they snicker right at your face and would probably start teabagging you if this was a different kind of game.
yellow bean looks like the nerd emoji

Made entirely obsolete by basically any subsequent Puyo Puyo game. Without offset or other key mechanics that came to the series later (such as double tapping rotate to flip your puyos even if they don't have room to rotate), victory in the arcade mode becomes very dependent on luck.
I have too strong feelings about American Sega's apparent need during the 90s to project their own (entirely ill-defined) fan-fictionesque personality, worldbuilding, and character designs onto Sonic, and while this game serves as a key example of that, that feels like a rant ill-suited for a review of the game itself.

Oh, right, I guess I wasn't done with the Game Gear games. Sometimes I forget Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine had a handheld version, as I suspect most people do. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would play this version of the game today unless they really want to wring all $40 of value out of their copy of Sonic Origins, or if they've made the commitment to play every Sonic game they possibly can, like a certain bean-loving fool.....

Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.

That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed of puyos beans late in the game and the poor responsiveness of the controls can make this more challenging as your well starts to fill up with fumbled beans. The CPU is far less inclined to cheat, but everything else is considerably more unwieldy.

I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.

Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?

“Let’s try hardest level.”

No, game, I don’t believe I will.

I’m not really sure what draws me to try every Puyo Puyo variant available on the NSO even though my reflexes are NOT good enough for these games and I end up really frustrated, but… like, it is fun. The animations are fun. Winning feels good. It’s pretty great, even though it feels like totally random at times.

I rated it the same because I felt roughly the same about it, but I think I like Kirby’s Avalanche more because I like Kirby more than, uh, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Weird Sassy Kirby was more fun than, uh, a complete lack of player stand-in. Are we supposed to be Has-Bean AKA We Didn’t Bother Changing the Little Puyo Puyo Guy Who Dances Between The Players? God couldn’t they at least put in Flicky. Come on.

I did appreciate Scratch, Grounder, and Robotnik though. Something something snooping as usual I see. Man though like. I think Coconuts was in the show but were any of the other robots aside from those three in AoStH or were they original? I preferred SatAM because I was at the age to prefer that over Looney Tunes and so I don’t know AoStH as well. I will say this game is better to me than the SatAM-inspired game, at least…